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Address: 301 Ritter Hall, Saint Louis University

Phone: (716) 262-5637

Email: nan.cen@slu.edu       

News

August 2023: Congratulations to Peijun! Our work "Proximal Policy Optimization for User Association in Hybrid LiFi/WiFi Indoor Networks" has been accepted into Globecom 2023. 

June 2023: Congratulations to Peijun! Our work "DC-PPO for Joint User Association and Power Allocation in Dynamic Indoor Hybrid VLC/RF Networks" has been accepted into MASS 2023. 

February 2023: Congratulations to Yuwei Long! Our work "Q-learning for Sum-Throughput Optimization in Wireless Visible-Light UAV Networks" will be presented in IEEE INFOCOM WKSHPS DroneCom 2023.   

September 2022: Congratulations to Yue Zhang!  Our work "Programmable Software-Defined Testbed for Visible Light UAV Networks: Architecture Design and Implementation" will be presented in IEEE CCNC 2023. 

February 2022: Our lab research has been highlighted on the S&T webpage: https://news.mst.edu/2022/02/shining-a-light-on-data-transfer-2/

October 2021: Congratulations to Yuwei Long. Our work "Sum-Rate Optimization for Visible-Light-Band UAV Networks Based on Particle Swarm Optimization" will be presented in IEEE CCNC 2022. 

September 2021: Welcome Yue Zhang to join our lab as a thesis-based master's student!

September 2021: I was invited to co-chair the N2Women workshop at WoWMoM 2022. Stay tuned! Hopefully, we can make this an in-person event! 

April 2021: I was invited to serve on the Board of NSF review panel. 

March 2021: I was invited to join the Reviewer Board of MDPI Electronics.  

February 2021: The WNIS Lab Ph.D. student Xiaohui Chen received IEEE PerCom 2021 NSF Participacipation Grant. Congrats, Xiaohui! 

January 2021: Our work "Compressed Sensing based Low-Power Multi-View Video Coding and Transmission in Wireless Multi-path Multi-hop Networks" will be published in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. 

One RA position or possible TA positions are currently available for self-motivated, passionate graduate students in the WNIS laboratory. 

• Interested students can send their applications (along with a detailed CV) to nancen@mst.edu. 

• Preference will be given to Ph.D. applications.

Research Opportunities for Undergraduate/Master Students (Jan. 2021): We have opportunities for undergraduate/master research in wireless Internet of Things, Visible-Light networks, AI for wireless networks, software-defined networking, and drone networks. We accept only volunteers at the moment. If you are interested in our work please send an email with your CV/resume to nancen@mst.edu.

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science (CS) at Missouri University of Science and Technology. I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northeastern University in 2019, under the supervision of Professor Tommaso Melodia. I also received my M.S. in Electrical Engineering from The State University of New York at Buffalo in 2014. I had previously received my B.S. in Information Science and Engineering and M.S. from Shandong University in 2008 and 2011. From 2011 to 2012 I was a software developer of Alcatel-Lucent Co. in Qingdao, China. I worked as a summer intern in Bell Labs and in IBM in 2014 and 2010, respectively. I direct the Wireless Networks and Intelligent Systems (WNIS) Lab at MST, with research interests in modeling, control, and system design for next-generation intelligent wireless networks.  

Research

• Visible Light Networking

  • • Protocol design software-defined control, network optimization, security

• Wireless Internet of Things

  • • Optimal video streaming over constrained devices, coding/decoding architecture design, video streaming based on compressed sensing, drone ad hoc networks, deep-learning-based wireless Internet-of-Things platform 

• 5G New Radio

  • • Massive MIMO, beamforming, millimeter wave, THz communication

• Broadband wireless networking

Publications

Journals and Magazines

• 1. Jiandong Wu, Austin Sigler, Annalise Pfaff, Nan Cen, Nuran Ercal, Honglan Shi, "Development of a HPLC-MS/MS method for assessment of thiol redox status in human tear fluids", in Analytical Biochemistry, 2021.

  2. N. Cen, Z. Guan, T. Melodia, "Compressed Sensing based Low-Power Multi-view Video Coding and Transmission in Wireless Multi-path Multi-hop Networks"  in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2021. [pdf] [bibtex]

  3. Z. Guan, N. Cen, T. Melodia, S. Pudlewski " Joint Power, Association and Flight Control for Massive-MIMO Self-Organizing Flying Drones," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2020. [pdf] [bibtex]

  4. N. Cen, J. Jagannath, S. Simone, Z. Guan, T. Melodia, " LANET: Visible-Light Ad Hoc Networks," in Ad Hoc Networks (Elsevier), 2018. [pdf] [bibtex]

  5. N. Cen, Z. Guan, T. Melodia, " Inter-view Motion Compensated Joint Decoding of Compressive-Sampled Multiview Video Streaming," in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1117-1126, June 2017. [pdf] [bibtex]

  6. S. Pudlewski, N. Cen, Z. Guan, and T. Melodia, "Video Transmission over Lossy Wireless Networks: A Cross-layer Perspective," IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing, in press 2014. [pdf] [bibtex]

Conference Papers

1. Y. Long, N. Cen, "Sum-Rate Optimization for Visible-Light-Band UAV Networks Based on Particle Swarm Optimization ", in Proc. of IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference, January 2022. 

2. N. Cen, "FLight: Towards Programmable Visible-Light-Band Wireless UAV Networking,"  in Proc. of ACM Mobicom Workshop on LIGHT UP THE IOT, London, United Kingdom, September 2020. [pdf] [bibtex]

3. N. Cen, S. K. Das, " Unlocking the Potential of Visible-Light Communication toward Broadband Connectivity," in National Science Foundation (NSF) Workshop on Wireless, Spectrum & Innovation, Washington D. C., USA, August 27 & 28, 2020.

4. N. Cen, N. Dave, E. Demirors, Z. Guan, T. Melodia, "LiBeam: Throughput-Optimal Cooperative Beamforming for Indoor Visible Light Networks," in Proc. of IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (InfoCom), Paris, France, April 2019. [pdf] [bibtex]

5. Z. Guan, Nan Cen, T. Melodia, Scott Pudlewski, "Self-Organizing Flying Drones with Massive MIMO Networking," in Proc. of Mediterranean Ad Hoc Networking Workshop (Med-Hoc-Net), Capri, Italy, June 2018. [pdf] [bibtex]

6. N. Cen, Z. Guan, T. Melodia, "Multiview Wireless Video Streaming Based on Compressed Sensing: Architecture and Network Optimization," in Proc. of ACM Intl. Symp. on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc), Hangzhou, China, June 2015. [pdf] [bibtex]

7. N. Cen, Z. Guan, T. Melodia, "Joint Decoding of Independently Encoded Compressive Multi-view Video Streams," in Proc. of Picture Coding Symposium (PCS), San Jose, CA, December 2013. [pdf] [bibtex]

8. J. Sun, N. Cen, D. Yuan, "Implementation of a 2x2 MIMO-OFDM Real-time System on DSP/FPGA Platform," in Proc. of Communications and Mobile Computing (CMC), Qingdao, China, April 2011. [pdf] [bibtex]

Other Presentations

• N. Cen, Z. Guan, T. Melodia, "LANET: Software-defined Visible-light Ad Hoc Networks," in Joint 7th N2Women and WICE: Professional Development Workshop, Kansas City, MO, USA, May 2018.

Service

NSF Review Panel:

Reviewer

Journal Editorship:

Member of Reviewer Board, MDPI Electronics, since March 2021

Review Editor, Communications and Networks (Frontiers), since May 2020

Conference Organizations:

N2Women Workshop Co-chair,  IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, Boston, USA, June 2023. 

N2Women Workshop Co-chair,  IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 2022. 

TPC Member:

ACM MobiArch 2022

EAI WiCON 2022

IEEE WCNEE, 2021

IEEE WCNEE, 2020

IEEE/ACM IWQoS 2020

IEEE WPSN 2020

IEEE PIMRC 2020

Reviewer:

IEEE Journals: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

Elsevier Journals: Elsevier Journal on Ad Hoc Networks, Elsevier Journal on Computer Networks

Conferences: GLOBECOM, PIMRC, MILCOM, WCNC, MED-Hoc-Net, 

Links

Computer Science @ Missouri University of Science and Technology

Wireless Networks and Embedded Systems (WiNES) Lab @ Northeastern University

Electrical Engineering @ State University of New York at Buffalo

Information Science and Engineering @ Shandong University